China plans to build enormous solar array in space — and it could collect more energy in a year than ‘all the oil on Earth’. It will be lifted into orbit piece by piece using the nation’s brand-new heavy lift rockets.
https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/china-plans-to-build-enormous-solar-array-in-space-and-it-could-collect-more-energy-in-a-year-than-all-the-oil-on-earth
by The_Weekend_Baker
24 comments
The next Bond movie will be about stopping the evil villain who has taken control of it to curve it into a giant reflecting mirror for burning cities.
But… but how are those poor oil billionaires going to feed themselves?? How are they going to make money to buy 16 multimillion mansions around the world?? 😢 (It’s a joke btw, I 100% support these projects, very scifi and is much less damaging to the environment).
“China plans” might a bit generous. How about “some guy in China talks about”?
Meanwhile we’re here in America banning wind farms.
How will they transmit the aforementioned power to Earth? You can’t exactly run a line down.
Nothing can go wrong here
All this stuff wizzing around the planet at 24,000 meters per second.
We making Bishop rings?
I wouldn’t mind a dyson sphere.
It’s crazy that China will beat the US in technology and energy, not because they smarter, or more capable, or “better” in some way, but just because the US is intentionally giving up on the race and letting China win.
Judging the size of the array on ISS to power it, this array will be a Dyson Sphere?
meanwhile in ‘murica, we’re bringin back coal!
If you think about it, this is kinda like a reverse dyson sphere. Building a sun around the earth instead of building an “earth” around a sun.
Can they park it over Phoenix, we could use some shade…
I mean China was the leader in panels and even they believe in climate change. Meanwhile the president elect is taking huge dumps on a state that is a major economic driver of the entire nation
Collecting solar energy in space sounds fantastic. How is the energy then transported to earth?
Son in law will fix it, give him some time
This is gonna go well. Are they going to compensate people when pieces fall on them?
Lol sure china 🇨🇳🤣😂
No, it can’t.
There’s about 1500 billion barrels of oil left in the world. This is referred to as the ‘recoverable reserve’, which is a best guess of how much oil there’s left to extract in the world.
In terms of energy, that’s 2550 petawatt-hours (or billion-million-kilowatt hours).
To generate that in a year, assuming ideal conditions (1000 watts per m2) you’d need a 291,000 GW of solar panels – that’s roughly 100x more than is installed in the world today. Here, it would form a 540x540km array – in terms of area, that’s larger than Italy(!)
Not only that – getting stuff into geostationary orbit requires a ridiculous amount of energy. The space shuttle, which famously was pretty good at getting stuff into space – could lift 27 tons into low earth orbit. But only one tenth of that into geostationary orbit.
Imagine getting an Italy sized solar array into space. Now, multiply that effort with 10 – and that’s what we’re talking about here.
Imagine. Just imagine what we could do as mankind if we could all work together for the good of our planet. Stop spending on war, and cooperatively make the world a better place.
lol imagine if it created a cold shadow across parts of the earth that kept moving
How are they going to transmit the collected energy back to Earth?
And they’ll transfer the collected energy back to earth using lasers LMAO this won’t end badly
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